How to Send Astronauts to Asteroids? Earth Needs to Know, Report Suggests

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Developing the capability to launch human missions to asteroids
would aid humanity's ability to foil a potentially devastating
asteroid strike and help spur our march to Mars, a new report
finds.

What's most needed to make
manned asteroid missions possible, the report further
concludes, is a comprehensive survey of the Near Earth Object
(NEO) population, which would greatly aid planning efforts.

The new report, entitled "Target NEO: Open Global Community NEO
Workshop," is anchored in views expressed by experts who gathered
at George Washington University (GWU) in Washington in February.
But this latest appraisal includes extensive peer review and
refined findings from a number of follow-up meetings, both in the
United States and abroad. [ Photos:
Asteroids in Deep Space ]

The key question posed by the GWU workshop: What information
about NEOs is still needed to support a robust, sustainable human
exploration program?

While this question prompted a variety of recommendations, a
primary conclusion by the participants is the need for a
space-based survey telescope to greatly expand the catalog of
accessible
asteroid targets for human exploration.

The space rock menace

There is a growing list of stakeholders supportive of NEO
exploration, said Paul Abell, lead scientist for planetary small
bodies at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science
Directorate of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Small bodies have become a magnet for multiple interest groups in
the U.S. and abroad, Abell said, be they space scientists,
astrobiologists, planetary defense planners or NEO specialists
who eye the rocky worlds as resource nodes.

For example, NASA recently selected an
asteroid sample return mission called Origins-Spectral
Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith
Explorer, or OSIRIS-Rex. OSIRIS-Rex will be the first U.S.
mission to carry samples from an asteroid back to Earth.

Japanese space officials are moving forward on their Hayabusa 2
asteroid explorer. Russia is readying its Phobos-Grunt spacecraft
to explore a moon of Mars, and Canada is pressing forward on its
dual-purpose microsatellite, NEOSSAT.

Then there’s the new, surprising data flooding in from NASA’s
Dawn probe that’s taking a long look at Vesta, the second-largest
object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
[ 5
Reasons to Care About Asteroids ]

"It shows you that, every time we go places, we’re always
surprised and there’s so much to learn," Abell said. "That’s the
fun part of science and exploration."

The "Target NEO" report points out that programs and planned
missions to asteroids may be leveraged for mutual benefit in
terms of data exchange. It also recommends coordination with the
European Space Agency and other space agencies on a
planetary defense demonstration mission.

Stepping stones to Mars

As for dispatching astronauts to asteroids, the report envisions
that a target NEO will need to be discovered several years in
advance to provide enough lead time to deliver robotic precursor
missions, plan the human mission and deliver the crew to the
chosen destination.

Both asteroids and Mars, for example, would have much greater
lags in communication times. So deep space missions would require
the sharpening of true autonomy acumen, as well as a great deal
of confidence in redundant hardware, deep space propulsion, life
support gear and radiation shielding.

Space exploration primer

A major report finding is that human spaceflight know-how — the
body of data required to support the flinging of flesh outward to
a NEO, a journey that would take many months roundtrip — "is
severely limited at this time." [ Video: Asteroid
Collision Watch ]

Furthermore, behavioral health support and the psychological and
sociological issues associated with a NEO-bound crew cramped up
in relatively small quarters "are also significant concerns that
increase the risk to the mission."

Overall, the report flags the fact that deep space missions do
not afford the abort opportunities and psychological comfort
provided by rapid return to our home planet — a hallmark of
missions in cislunar space, particularly those carried out in
low-Earth orbit.

Bottom line: Far more work is necessary to support human sojourns
outside of the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. A biological
bugaboo is the acute and long-term physiological effects of
space radiation on the human body.

Looming space decisions

"We will soon begin writing the next chapter of our human
spaceflight saga, and a near-Earth object may be humanity’s first
destination beyond the Earth-moon system," said Brent Barbee,
editor of the report and a flight dynamics engineer at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "There are
many decisions to be made regarding how we approach that
challenge."

Barbee said that he and his colleagues hope the new workshop
report will be a valuable reference that helps inform critical
decision-making. And there are a number of decisions forthcoming
to help focus on NEO visitation questions.

One of the most important messages in the report, Barbee told
SPACE.com, is the wisdom of deploying a space-based survey
telescope capable of detecting a significant portion of the
undiscovered NEO population.

But while there are several capable
NEO survey ideas that exist at varying degrees of maturity,
the report recommends that more study of these potential concepts
is necessary to objectively scrutinize them against a common set
of requirements and in a way that permits direct cost comparison.

"Only a few of the currently known NEOs offer potentially
feasible human mission opportunities during the 2025-2030
timeframe, and those NEOs are very small in size. A space-based
survey has the capacity to escape the geometrical observing
constraints which hinder ground-based surveys and thus discover
many more NEOs relatively quickly, including a better set of
candidate NEO destinations," Barbee said. "Those discoveries
would simultaneously benefit the science, exploration, and
planetary defense communities."

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for
more than five decades. He is a winner of this year's National
Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National
Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has
written for SPACE.com since 1999.

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